The sad fact is, our nation is probably in its death throws. Well, the nation as the founders envisioned is long dead now, so it really comes to a matter of perspective. But a nation is more than simply the government, it’s about the kinds of people who live in it. A long time ago, a few weirdoes decided that their weird ideas were the best way that humanity could manage its affairs and set out to impose this worldview on the rest of us.
And so, as slick as snake oil salesmen, they set out to produce their Eden, their Utopia, with nothing more than the money they had inherited from their productive fathers, a handful of guilt, and a pocketful of dreams. But those dreams would be nightmares for the rest of us if we ever dreamed them because our roles in those dreams were not their roles, no matter what they said.
And so, they target specific kinds of people. At first they targeted people who they perceived as hopeless. The blue collar workers were the first ones to be targeted because they were dissatisfied with their own lives. It wasn’t that these workers were interested in big changes, just small ones. Shorter work weeks (10-hour days instead of 12-hour days) was probably their largest complaint.
So these weirdoes targeted the downtrodden in an attempt to expand their agenda by voting numbers. It didn’t work too well. The workers got their changes and decided that the expanded agenda wasn’t worth it.
So they targeted politicians and began to get hired into positions of power. Naturally, this route was more effective. They became part of the machine, but in doing so, their weird and twisted visions became warped into sinister reflection even more horrible than before. It wasn’t long before they became a part of the machine, the system, with only minor modifications to their ideals.
Such was the movement of the progressives. It spanned everything from women’s rights to total redistribution of wealth to euthanasia to what they considered to be the inferior races. Now their ideology is tied to the State and the State has become a parasite. People look at the State and call it a necessary evil, but why should we believe that evil is necessary. The State is as much an option as anything else in life. Most people don’t see it that way because the State, through its monopolization of force, has made sure that we see it their way.
The route that we are going, where conservatives and libertarians are fighting for power in government is probably a misguided route. The Statist progressives always had a place for strong, central government, they just were flexible enough to modify their own views to fit the needs of the State while adding what little they could along the way.
You can’t do that with limited government. Nobody ever gets elected by saying he will cut the size and scope of government power. There are enough people out there who like security rather than freedom. In some cases you might be better off simply running on a platform of raising taxes.
The best thing you can do is live as a sovereign individual and fight anyone attempts to steer you in a direction you don’t like. If everyone would simply leave all their concerns for complete strangers at the door, I doubt we’d have this massive warfare-welfare state in which we live.
But as long as the premise is that we need government, we’ve lost our liberties. It’s really just a matter of time before all this happens again if we go that route.